'On this day, September 25th, 1066, the Viking Age came to an end.
At least, that's the traditional date historians often use.
At the Battle of Stamford Bridge, Harald Hardrada and his Norwegian army were defeated by the English king Harold Godwinson. Hardrada was killed, and the battle became a convenient marker for the end of roughly 250 years of Viking expansion.
It wasn't that Scandinavian raids suddenly stopped on September 26th, or that Scandinavians completely changed overnight.
What changed was the world around them. Scandinavian kingdoms had become more centralized and integrated into Christian Europe, and the era when Viking armies could repeatedly raid, conquer, settle, and dominate huge parts of Europe was coming to an end.
There were still wars, raids and Scandinavian expansion afterward—but increasingly the fighting looked more like the warfare of other medieval European kingdoms.
Why 1066 makes such a useful dividing line is exactly what I go into in this video.'